CPAC Interview: Allen Covert

posted at 1:40 pm on February 11, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Yesterday, I walked out of Bloggers Row to make my way to one of the events, and I walked past someone I thought I recognized. I introduced myself to Allen Covert, who has appeared in almost every Adam Sandler film — including my favorite role of his as Sammy, the limo driver and best friend in The Wedding Singer. Allen made his first visit to CPAC this year in order to promote a new venture called Cherry Tree Children, an e-book effort that teaches traditional values to younger children, between the ages of 3 to 6 years of age. The books fill the same kind of role as the old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, Allen tells me in this video:

On a personal note, Allen turns out to be a terrific guy. You’ll see that in the interview, too, but it’s not an act. He was friendly and engaging with everyone in and around our Townhall booth. He’s a Hot Air reader (which would qualify him for terrific guy status all on its own), but he’s just a genuinely nice man. This interview was one of my favorite moments at CPAC.

Be sure to check out the Cherry Tree app on iPad and iPhone, and it will be available for Amazon Kindle very soon, too. I’m looking forward to buying the books (at $2.99 each, a steal) for my granddaughters.

Update: Not long after this posted, I ran into Allen one more time, and he told me (after having read this post) that he’s been reading me since Captain’s Quarters. Now that’s pretty cool.

Blowback

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School house Rock was very influential back in the cartoon days. I can sing those things by memory and got them on netflix for my kids. Loved ‘em—those were back in the days when programming was actually aimed at educating kids about our country, before the radicals got a hold of it.

I didn’t know Allen Covert was a [gasp!] conservative. Then again he’s basically just a character actor who appears almost exclusively in Adam Sandler movies, so dude’s politics wouldn’t exactly be common knowledge.

I don’t think this will harm his career in any way since Sandler is by all accounts a very kind and loyal guy who’ll continue to get him movie parts. Plus he himself is reportedly a Republican.

Once again, CPAC is avoiding and ignoring the greatest national security threat to our country: jihad. Year in, year out, the puppetmasters, Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, have managed to keep jihad and sharia off the CPAC schedule. The American Conservative Union, the political right’s largest and most influential grassroots umbrella organization — and sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — has abandoned conservative principles and morphed into some fleshy, ambiguous, compromised political machine doling out money and favors for cronies, when it is doing anything at all.

Anti-sharia legislation has already been passed into law in three states — Tennessee (April 2010), Louisiana (June 2010), and Arizona (May 2011) — and is either scheduled to be introduced or under consideration in over 25 additional states for the coming legislative session. Half the country is deeply concerned about this issue, and yet it is nowhere on the CPAC schedule — except, of course, when it comes to yours truly.

The people care about this issue. Conservatives care about this issue. CPAC should feature this issue.

This is why I organize an event every year at CPAC to educate the upwards of twelve thousand conservatives who come to D.C. to get activated. Do you think that they know that CPAC has been utterly corrupted by the likes of Grover Norquist, the most powerful Muslim Brotherhood-linked influence-peddler in the country? Hardly. Has it been easy going up against the most corrupt and powerful conservative in America? Hardly. I lost my Newsmax column because of it, as I have repeatedly called for an insurgency at CPAC.

And to all the old establishment bulls who know about but sanction this infiltration with their silence: shame on you. It is no accident that Grover is featured in a fawning cover story at Newsmax as we enter CPAC week.

Doing our events at CPAC is always a challenge. This is just the latest of my battles to bring the truth about jihad to CPAC. At CPAC 2009, I brought Geert Wilders to CPAC to introduce him and his fight for free speech to conservatives. It was standing room only. We had to turn away hundreds. And what a battle I had just getting Wilders there. I fought fiercely for months trying to get Wilders on the official CPAC roster. They should have been clamoring to have him. He represented the fight for the idea of American freedom, free speech.

After many a discussion, I was advised that David Keene, then-head of the ACU and also of CPAC, would be giving the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award to Geert Wilders for his fight for free speech (the very bedrock of conservative principles, as I chided and reminded Keene). Yet within 24 hours of the decision to give Wilders the award, the award itself was withdrawn. Heston would not have been pleased. Keene canceled the decision to honor Wilders because of an article in Newsweek in which David Horowitz and Robert Spencer criticized CPAC for its Grover Norquist-mandated refusal to deal with the jihad or Islamic supremacism in any meaningful or effective way. Paul Jacob, president of Citizens in Charge Foundation, was instead given the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award. Who’s that again?

Hey Ed, I saw you on FoxNews today around 1:30 pm. They were introducing the topics they wanted to talk about after an upcoming commercial break. They flashed a scene of the CPAC stage, and there you were, on my TV screen, front and center.

After watching Covert on Red Eye a few times it seemed to me that he was leaning conservative in the discussions. The guy is always smiling! How nice it would be if his stories were played between cartoons on TV like School House Rock was played in the seventies.